egocentric predicament each person’s apparently problematic position as an experiencing subject, assuming that all our experiences are private in that no one else can have them. Two problems concern our ability to gain empirical knowledge. First, it is hard to see how we gain empirical knowledge of what others experience, if all experience is private. We cannot have their experience to see what it is like, for any experience we have is our experience and so not theirs. Second, it is hard to see how we gain empirical knowledge of how the external world is, independently of our experience. All our empirically justified beliefs seem to rest ultimately on what is given in experience, and if the empirically given is private, it seems it can only support justified beliefs about the world as we experience it. A third major problem concerns our ability to communicate with others. It is hard to see how we describe the world in a language others understand. We give meaning to some of our words by defining them by other words that already have meaning, and this process of definition appears to end with words we define ostensively; i.e., we use them to name something given in experience. If experiences are private, no one else can grasp the meaning of our ostensively defined words or any words we use them to define. No one else can understand our attempts to describe the world. See also PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGU- MENT , PROBLEM OF OTHER MIND. P.Mar.